Facebook edges past Google for weekly traffic

Facebook nudged past search king Google in traffic last week to become the most visited Web site of the week in the United States, according to the online measurement service Hitwise.

Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise, said in a blog post that Facebook had 7.07 percent of all Web traffic for the week of March 13, edging Google’s 7.03 percent.

Facebook has been threatening Google for some time, hitting the Hitwise top spot on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and the weekend of March 6 and 7.

But the new weekly milestone caps a rapid climb for Facebook, which in March 2009 accounted for slightly more than 2 percent of U.S. Web traffic. That’s a 185 percent increase compared to this time last year, although Google also gained 9 percent in traffic during the same period, Dougherty said.

Hitwise is only one measure of Web traffic and it remains to be seen whether other Web metrics will show the same shift at the top. Compete.com, for example, had Google still on top with about 147 million unique monthly visitors in January, although Facebook was charging hard with 133 million unique visitors.